Sublime

For Shimen, the “community” is a set of concentric circles beginning with his (dead) family, extending to Gerer Hasidim, and extending further to others committed to the Jewish way of life; the farther out the circle, the less weight it earns in Shimen’s calculus.

Mel: It was. You know, I would have been a star ten years before I became a star. There was a great, great star, a great actor-comedian, Sid Caesar. And had I not run into Sid Caesar I probably would have gone from the Borscht Belt—“You’re looking at me, ladies and gentlemen, I met a girl who was so thin, this girl was so skinny you can’t believe i

A medieval sage, Rabbi Asher ben Yehiel (Rosh, 1250?–1327), insists that this mitzvah of receiving people warmly applies not just to one-on-one encounters but also to the way we carry ourselves in public. “Let not your face be angry toward passersby,” he says, “but receive them with a friendly countenance.”48 How we comport ourselves in the world m

Mario Bennett, a backup center with Hakeem Olajuwon’s physique, Spencer Dunkley’s skill set, and a cucumber sponge’s intellect,

But Moshe had badly overestimated the organizational power of country Jewish rabbis, and most of the notices were lost in the ongoing rush of death notices, bar mitzvah commitments, once-in-a-lifetime sales, kosher cow-slaughtering requests, tallit-making services, business-dispute refereeing, mohel (circumcision) mix-ups, and marriage-arrangement

“A good neighbor [is paramount]!”

Abraham ibn Daud.

“If not you, who? If not now, when?”—Hillel the Elder